Don’t count out human writers in the age of artificial intelligence

In 2025, human writers will reassert their value. In recent years, the race for more and more content has been driven by technological and market imperatives like SEO, which serves neither the creator nor the consumer. Human needs and desires have been marginalized in favor of the attention economy and the drive for clicks.

Once hailed as a boon to freedom of expression, the early promise of the Internet has let us down. Literature and journalism have been replaced by worthless “content”, intended primarily to fill web pages rather than to inform or entertain. At the same time, writers’ incomes declined. Copywriters Licensing Association It reported a 60.2% decline in authors’ income when adjusted for inflation from 2006 to 2022. Amnesty International To many, it seemed like the final nail in the writers’ coffin.

But 2025 will be a turning point, not for artificial intelligence replacing us, but for a renewed appreciation for the emotional, spiritual, political, cultural, and ultimately financial value of high-quality human writing. Ironically, the advent of AI-generated search, disrupting traffic to authentic websites, will eliminate the need for meaningless “content” to game the system, and push people to demand better.

Generative AI has sparked a slew of lawsuits and industrial and regulatory actions. Data protection regulators in the European Union and the United Kingdom, over complaints from civil society organization NOYB, successfully halted Meta’s plans to train its AI on users’ posts, photos and interactions. Traditional publishers, such as The New York Times, have taken the initiative to protect their own interests, and with them those of their contributors. But some newspapers, such as the Financial Times and The Atlantic in particular, have entered into agreements with generative AI companies, likely because they believe it is impossible to stem the tide. In 2025, they will be proven wrong.

As copyright lawsuits continue in the courts, in 2025, we will also see decisions on liability for the inevitable errors produced by generative AI. Defamation cases against AI companies and publishers using AI content will reach their peak as slanderous lies spread online and are amplified by unthinking bots and AI search engines. In 2024, the academic publisher, Wiley, Closing 19 magazines In the face of a flood of fake scientific papers. Making mistakes is human, but counterfeiting on an industrial scale is largely a technological problem. AI has no professional ethics, it has no soul, and it has nothing to lose, but the people who use it, or ask others to use it to their advantage, do.

In 2023, AI companies have begun hiring poets from around the world to try to bring something close to creativity to their dead products. And in 2024, copywriters find their careers, seemingly doomed by AI, revived as they humanize artificial marketing content that doesn’t pass an algorithmic test, let alone a human test for quality. The value of human creators is beginning to outweigh the companies that sought to crush them, yet even machines have not been fooled by artificial intelligence. But editing machine writing is boring, so will writers say no in the end? Will readers join them?

The London premiere of The Last Screenwriter, a film by ChatGPT 4.0, was canceled in June 2024 after the cinema received more than 200 complaints about the film’s premise.

Publishers who relied on people would attract the best writers and, ultimately, the most lucrative audiences. And with many media outlets offering little or no compensation to freelance writers, these humans will be loathe to sell their souls on the cheap to train an AI to replace them. Publishers who sell their writers will see their talent go elsewhere, and with them their readers.

In a world awash with derivative, automated nonsense, human writers will allow readers to breathe the air, like a green garden in a polluted city. Instead of being destroyed by AI, in 2025 we will see a recognition of the inherent value of high-quality human writing, and perhaps human writers will be able to start capturing its value.